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Archive for 2016
January 11, 2016
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: ‘Is Sean Penn a CIA spy?’
I would tend to doubt it very much, but it certainly would explain the last seven years, no?
Related: “Idiotic: Deadline Hollywood falls for fake article on Sean Penn and ISIS.”
Hey, the San Francisco Chronicle — for reasons known only to themselves — did send Sean Penn, Ace Journalist to “report” on the Iranian “elections” a decade ago — proving once again that truth is far, far weirder than fiction. After chumming it up with the dictator Hugo Chavez, Penn barked to the Guardian that, as the far left British Website paraphrased Penn’s word salad, “Journalists who call Hugo Chávez a dictator should be jailed.”
But does even the truest of the true blue lefty believer say to his or her or ze or zirself, “Hey, that El Chapo fella/ Hugo Chavez / the Iranian elections — I wonder what Sean Penn’s perspective is on this crucial issue of the day?
On the other hand though, this Sean Penn article would be awesome:
This is your chance to return to the big leagues once again, Esquire — make this happen!
Before it’s too late, that is — as Tim Blair writes, even more so than before, right now “you do not want to be Sean Penn…in short, you do not want to be connected to Sean Penn in any way.”
DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A BYLINE SAYS WHAT?
Shot:
During the panel discussion on the Sunday edition ABC’s This Week, panelist and PBS host Tavis Smiley declared that he was “tickled” by the birtherism surrounding Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz being perpetuated by “an unrepentant, irascible religious and racial arsonist” in Donald Trump who also “troubles” him in that the media hasn’t supposedly tried to project Trump on the entire GOP.
Interjecting with his thoughts on the near exhaustive coverage of whether Cruz is eligible to be president, Smiley explained that he’s “happy to see Donald Trump go after Cruz on this issue” since, in his mind, the Republican Party had been collectively “so aggressive going after President Obama” with the birtherism questions.
—“Tavis Smiley: I’m ‘Tickled’ by Cruz Birtherism from ‘Unrepentant,’ ‘Racial Arsonist’ Trump,” NewsBusters, yesterday.
Chaser:
I recovered from my mistake because I was, as the title of the book suggests, able to “fail up”; that is, I took my failure in that moment and made it a stepping stone. I learned my lesson: Never again would I lazily let something pass on air as fact without double, triple, and quadruple checking. Not only did my earlier mistake jeopardize my integrity, it contributed to the public’s already-skeptical view on the media. This, ultimately, is a much more dangerous situation for all of us, as an untrustworthy news media puts our democracy at risk.
Thus the real danger in the artificial crisis over the president’s birth certificate is not Donald Trump becoming president, but a news media unwilling to apply a basic filter for what it publishes, posts and broadcasts. Failing to do so degrades the quality of news in general, making people less trusting and increasingly disinterested.
When nonstories fill the airwaves and dominate headlines, people stop paying attention and miss the real news. But more importantly when so much energy and so many resources are devoted to chasing a phantom issue, the real issues get ignored.
—“Media helped inflate the birther story,” Tavis Smiley, CNN, May 2, 2011.
GERMAN JUSTICE MINISTER: Cologne Attacks Planned In Advance.
Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas was the latest high-profile politician to speak out about the string of sexual assaults in Cologne on Sunday. In an interview with the popular “Bild am Sonntag” newspaper, Maas voiced his suspicions that the crimes which have the whole country reeling were not the result of an opportunistic mob mentality but a thought-out, planned attack on the city’s women.
“No one can tell me that it wasn’t coordinated and prepared,” the minister said. “My suspicion is that this specific date was picked, and a certain number of people expected. This would again add another dimension [to the crimes].”
The newspaper provided details from official police reports citing the use of social networks by some north African migrant communities to encourage their fellows to join them in the square between the Cologne train station and the cathedral, where the now hundreds of incidents of molestation and pick-pocketing took place.
His biggest worry, though, is that this will provoke anger at immigrants.
ROGER KIMBALL: SHOT/CHASER IN PHILADELPHIA:
So just how delusional is Edward Archer, pictured above (and below), the chap who ran up to Police Officer Jesse Hartnett’s cruiser on the streets of Philadelphia and, brandishing a stolen police revolver, unleashed a hail of bullets, wounding Hartnett? Archer, a recent convert to ISIS, said he did it “in the name of Islam.” That’s the shot. And here’s the chaser: according to Jim Kenney (D), the mayor of Philadelphia, Archer is so delusional he only thinks he did it in the name of Islam.
Read the whole thing.
MARCO RUBIO SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS, INSTEAD OF SIDING WITH GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION: Republican senator stands up to Ed. Dept. overreach.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., has written a letter to the secretary of the Education Department decrying the department’s federal overreach when it comes to bullying, harassment and sexual violence.
Lankford, who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, has taken specific issue with the Education Department’s rules regarding how schools adjudicate these issues. The department has issued multiple “Dear Colleague” letters imposing new rules, and with that, costs, on schools across the country without congressional approval or even a comment period.
The letters are subject to the Administrative Procedure Act, Lankford explains, because they amount to “substantive and binding regulatory policies that are effectively regulations.” Lankford asks for a “thorough justification of the letters by providing the precise statutory and/or regulatory authority under Title IX for each policy that the letters purport to interpret.”
Previously, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has cited Title IX as justification for forcing schools to adjudicate felonies such as sexual assault. Yet that is a very stretched interpretation of Title IX, which bans discrimination on the basis of sex. OCR has determined on its own that sexual harassment and sexual assault (even between same-sex partners) is a form of discrimination and therefore is covered under Title IX.
Even with that interpretation, nothing suggests that schools must set up kangaroo court systems to adjudicate accusations — that was yet another “interpretation” from OCR.
More like this, please.
PROGRESSIVISM: WHERE TIME STANDS STILL.
Shot:
In conclusion, our results suggest that United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians (including people who eat fish but not meat and those who eat meat <5 times per week on average) have similar all-cause mortality.
—“Mortality in vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians in the United Kingdom,” the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, October 2015, as spotted yesterday by Small Dead Animals.
Chaser:
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible —- the really disquieting —- prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right—the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party] were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
SALENA ZITO: The Dems, Not the GOP, in Disarray This Election. “Since the 2008 presidential campaign, Democrats have purposefully cut white, traditional-values, working-class, predominantly male voters from their coalition in favor of building an urban- and cosmopolitan-centered coalition of minorities, elites and women. That move left discarded voters with nowhere to go except toward the Republican Party, for which they turned out in large numbers in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and gave the GOP historic wins in state legislatures, governors’ offices and Congress. . . . For decades — and especially during the Obama presidency — traditional Democrat strongholds in the blue-collar North and in vast areas of the South have shifted, in some cases dramatically, to Republicans, he contends. Many registered Democrats in those regions now self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. Trump has captivated these voters, resulting in his commanding lead in the Republican field.”
THEY CHOSE. . . POORLY: At War With Conservatives, Stock Price Tanking, Users Alienated: Is This The Beginning Of The End For Twitter? “Almost every change Twitter has made to its service over the past year has served to turn more users against it.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON PROFFERS “REFLECTIONS ON WISE AND SUICIDAL IMMIGRATION,” noting that the success of American immigration policy of the past was based on “four enlightened rules:”
One, immigrants came legally. Breaking the law was a lousy way to start American residency. How can an immigrant continue to respect and follow his adopted country’s legal system when his first act as an American resident is to mock federal law?
Two, immigration was blind and diverse. It did not favor one particular group over another. The more diverse the immigrant blocs, the less likely they were to form lasting separate communities. There were, of course, mass influxes of immigrants in the past, but they were quite diverse: gobs of Germans, hordes of Irish, masses of Italians and Sicilians, huge influxes of Poles and Jews, lots of Japanese and Chinese, large arrivals of Mexicans. But note how diverse and varied were the immigrants’ places of origin and how destined they were to bump into each other upon arrival. Each group was wary of the other trying to use immigration as a crass tool to boost their own political fortunes by bringing in more kin than their rivals.
Three, immigrants usually arrived in manageable numbers; mass arrivals were usually periodic and episodic, not continuous and institutionalized. Only that way could the melting pot absorb newcomers and avoid the tribalism and factionalism that had always plagued so many prior failed multi-ethnic national experiments abroad. To avoid the fate of Austria-Hungary or Yugoslavia, immigrants—geographically, politically, culturally—by needs were soon intermixed and intermingled.
Four, both hosts and immigrants insisted on rapid Americanization. Immigrants learned English, followed all the laws of their host, and assumed America was good without having to be perfect. Otherwise they would have stayed home.
As VDH writes, “Unfortunately, 21st century immigration policy has forgotten these old rules and become illiberal and tribal. Is it any surprise that foolish immigration practices are proving as reactionary and destructive as wise ones were once enlightened and beneficial?”
Read the whole thing.
LIKE THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL, THE ONLY PART YOU CAN BE SURE OF THEM COMPLYING WITH IS THE PART WHERE THEY TAKE THE MONEY: EU’s Turkey Deal Isn’t Stopping Refugee Flow.
Start sanctioning the countries that refugees come from, and the leaders of countries that refugees come from.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: HILLARY’S EMAILGATE GOES NUCLEAR. Does the latest release of Hillary’s State Department emails include highly classified U.S. intelligence?
In fact, the June 8, 2011 Blumenthal report doesn’t read like CIA material at all, in other words human intelligence or HUMINT, but very much like signals intelligence or SIGINT (for the differences see here). I know what SIGINT reports look like, because I used to write them for the National Security Agency, America’s biggest source of intelligence. SIGINT reports, which I’ve read thousands of, have a very distinct style and flavor to them and Blumenthal’s write-up matches it, right down to the “Source Comments,” which smack very much of NSA reporting and its “house rules.”
But is this an NSA assessment? If so, it would have to be classified at least Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, a handling caveat that applies to most SIGINT, and quite possibly Top Secret/SCI, the highest normal classification we have. In that case, it was about as far from Unclassified as it’s possible for an email to be.
No surprise, NSA is aflutter this weekend over this strange matter. One Agency official expressed to me “at least 90 percent confidence” that Blumenthal’s June 8 report was derived from NSA reports, and the Agency ought to be investigating the matter right now.
There are many questions here. How did Sid Blumenthal, who had no position in the U.S. Government in 2011, and hasn’t since Bill Clinton left the White House fifteen years ago, possibly get his hands on such highly classified NSA reporting? Why did he place it an open, non-secure email to Hillary, who after all had plenty of legitimate access, as Secretary of State, to intelligence assessments from all our spy agencies? Moreover, how did the State Department think this was Unclassified and why did it release it to the public?
It’s possible this Blumenthal report did not come from NSA, but perhaps from another, non-American intelligence agency – but whose? If Sid was really able to get top-level intelligence like this for Hillary, using just his shoestring operation, and get it into her hands a day later, with precise information about the high-level conspiracy that was just discussed over in Sudan, the Intelligence Community needs to get him on our payroll stat. He’s a pro at the spy business.
Read the whole thing.
INTERNAL MIGRATION: “Simply put, Americans are moving from heavily-regulated, bureaucratic, high cost-of-living states to more affordable states.”
I had a piece on this phenomenon, and its implications for debt-laden blue states.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: PBS: Ted Cruz and His Father Are ‘Satanic.’
They may be onto something — not fair for Davids Corn and Brooks to drag his dad into it, but Ted certainly knows his Alinsky, almost as well as Hillary and Obama…
HEY RUBE! “True-Blue Obama — The lament of a conservative who really, really wanted to like him,” in this case, one “Matt Latimer, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush…co-partner in the literary agency and communications firm Javelin and contributing editor at Politico Magazine:”
Obama stood as a symbol that all things were possible. That governing could be different. That our country could be different.
More than that, I simply liked him. I even came very close to voting for him—and wasn’t alone: Twenty percent of Americans identifying themselves as conservatives, including many prominent Washington Republicans, did just that.
For the nearly eight years that have followed, I’ve tried very hard to remember that feeling. To not be that kind of conservative. You know the kind I mean—one who reflexively hates everything Obama says or does simply because he says it or does it, or who truly believes the president is a closet Muslim who gleefully sets American flags on fire when he sneaks back to his “real” home in Kenya or Tatooine or wherever.
But now I’ve come to the sobering conclusion that I’ve long since lost that feeling—about the country, and about him. Washington is very much the same, if not worse, at the close of these long, bitter, brutal years. That’s not all Obama’s fault, to be sure. Maybe mostly not his fault. But it is in part. And it isn’t what he promised to people like me.
Sucker.
Or as Mark Steyn wrote in March of 2009, when the scales began to fall from the rubes at the Economist, “This is the point: The nuancey boys were wrong on Obama, and the knuckledragging morons were right. There is no post-partisan centrist ‘grappling’ with the economy, only a transformative radical willing to make Americans poorer in the cause of massive government expansion. At some point, The Economist, Messrs Brooks, Buckley & Co are going to have to acknowledge this. If they’re planning on spending the rest of his term tutting that his management style is obstructing the effective implementation of his centrist agenda, it’s going to be a long four years.”
It’s been a long seven years — but at least those of who didn’t buy Barry’s conman shtick in 2008 weren’t under any illusions as to how “long, bitter, brutal” things were going to be.
BOB HERBERT ON BILL — AND HILLARY — CLINTON IN 2001: America, Cut Him Loose.
Mr. Clinton always had an easy, breezy relationship with wrongdoing. But the Democratic Party overlooked the ethical red flags and made a pact with Mr. Clinton that was the equivalent of a pact with the devil. And he delivered. With Mr. Clinton at the controls, the party won the White House twice. But in the process it lost its bearings and maybe even its soul.
Now, with the stench of yet another scandal polluting the political atmosphere, some of Mr. Clinton’s closest associates and supporters are acknowledging what his enemies have argued for years — the man is so thoroughly corrupt it’s frightening.
The president who hung a ”For Rent” sign on the door to the Lincoln Bedroom also conducted a clearance sale on pardons in his last weird sleepless days in the White House.
The fallout from those pardons is threatening to destroy Mr. Clinton, and perhaps also his wife, the junior senator from New York. He may finally be getting his due.
The Clintons can spin this however they want. But the simple truth is that the way in which some of the pardons were granted seems to fit neatly with the standard definition of a bribe, which is the promise of money or gifts — something of value — to influence the action or behavior of an official.
Marc Rich was one of the U.S. government’s 10 most wanted fugitives. He was accused, among other things, of wire fraud, racketeering, evading $48 million in taxes in what prosecutors described as the largest tax avoidance scheme in U.S. history, and violating the trade embargo against Iran during the hostage crisis.
Do we think something of value was exchanged for Mr. Clinton’s pardon of Mr. Rich? Or do we think Mr. Clinton went to bat for this billionaire fugitive because, darn it, it was the right thing to do?
Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation of the Rich pardon as well as Mr. Clinton’s decision to grant clemency to four Hasidic men who stole tens of millions of dollars from government agencies. The four men were from New Square, N.Y., a village in Rockland County that voted almost unanimously — 1,400 to 12 — for Hillary Clinton in last year’s Senate race.
Mrs. Clinton met with New Square’s religious leader, Rabbi David Twersky, during the Senate campaign. And in December, after winning the election, she and Mr. Clinton met at the White House with the rabbi.
Was there an understanding? Did the quids hook up with the quos in an illegal votes-for-clemency scheme? Mary Jo White, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is trying to find out.
The Clintons may or may not be led away in handcuffs someday. But whatever happens with the criminal investigations, it’s time for the Democratic Party to wise up. Ostracism would be a good first step.
Still waiting on the handcuffs. And the Democrats are too short on talent to write the Clintons off.
I WANT TO BELIEVE: Former Reagan Adviser Art Laffer: GOP Will ‘Landslide’ in 2016 — ’45, 46, 47 States Out of the 50.′
Meanwhile, Steve Hayward of Power Line has a somewhat more sober prognosis: “Turning Blue to Read?”
MULTIPLE SOURCES ARE REPORTING THE DEATH OF DAVID BOWIE AT AGE 69, after an 18 month fight with cancer, including this BBC report:
His son confirmed the news and a statement was released on his official social media accounts.
“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer,” it said.
“While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”
The singer only released his latest album Blackstar on his birthday on Friday.
There had been rumours about Bowie’s health for years.
His last live performance was at a New York charity concert in 2006.
The Huffington Post adds:
In 2004, the musician suffered chest pains while performing at a festival in Germany and collapsed backstage. While Bowie initially thought he pinched a nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as a clogged coronary artery and required emergency heart surgery. Rumors of his failing health persisted after the incident and his appearance was apparently cause for concern in 2012, when he was spotted in New York City looking like a “pale shadow of his former self,” according to The Telegraph.
Rumors he was not well continued as Bowie went on to release his first single in 10 years, “We Are We Now” in January 2013, prompting his close friend, producer Tony Visconti, to deny that the singer had Alzheimer’s disease.
I followed Bowie’s music from Ziggy to Heroes to Let’s Dance, to the Glass Spider tour of 1987. It didn’t always work for me, but I admired his commitment to constant experimentation and pushing rock’s sonic boundaries. U2 owe their sound to Tony Visconti, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s work with Bowie in the ’70s; Madonna’s whole career in trying on different personas is built on Bowie’s efforts as well. RIP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgcc5V9Hu3g
(Bumped.)
REMEMBER THAT SCIENCE FICTION STORY, DON’T LOOK NOW? The Economy: Don’t Look Now, But. . .
I ALWAYS WANTED TO DO A “THE MAN WHO TRAVELED IN ELEPHANTS” VACATION MYSELF: Strictly for Fun: Five Odd Touristy Places I’d Like to Visit.
THEY WANT TO GO BACK HOME: The Clintons are longing to find UFOs.
LOOKING FOR AN AUDIENCE NAIVE ENOUGH TO BELIEVE HER: Hillary’s new star turn: heroine of children’s books. It’s good to see the literary/news/entertainment establishment prove themselves as meretricious for Hillary as they were for Obama. I remember those comic books. Of course, no Republican candidate ever deserves this type of thing. And of course the establishment is Republican. Or at least that’s what the narrative says, right? I wonder they can’t tell it stinks like week old fish.
IF YOU HAVEN’T PRE-ORDERED YET: Dave Freer’s Changelling’s Island is up for pre-order, and Baen aficionados can now secure an e-arc (advance reading copy).